American literature is unique in the number of voices
and cultures it conveys, giving it the power to transform opinions and
challenge stereotypes in both obvious and subtle ways. Christa Smith
Andersonsays in
Texas they speak a whole ‘nuther way … and that the West is lassoed by
talented
writers.

In the Annie
Proulx novel That Old Ace in the Hole Bob Dollar
finds
himself in the Texas panhandle, where LaVon Fronk tells him the history
of the area and shares her own family's background there. “Most people
here has stayed for generations... starting with all those big ranches.
It was the shiftless ones who left. Most people stick even tighter when
the goin gets tough,”[1]
LaVon tells Bob how one local tradition in the novel came about. “While
my Graindeddy was pickin up bones and horns, he got some a his cowboys
a help him and one day they hauled a wagon-full down to Mobeetie.” The
cowboys got drunk and started throwing the bones at other ranch hands,
and the legendary Mobeetie Bone and Horn Fight was born.

Few writers have proven as versatile at capturing regional nuances
of voice as Western author Annie Proulx. In the short story “Brokeback
Mountain,” the main characters are Wyoming ranch hands. Jack and Ennis
meet one summer when they work for Joe Aguirre, who gives them a job
description: “What I want — camp tender in the main camp where the
Forest Service says, but the herder... pitch a pup tent on the
Q.T. with the sheep, out a sight, and he's goin a sleep there.”[2] After their summer together on
Brokeback Mountain, Jack spends some time “rodeoin,” returns and tells
Ennis, “See, it ain’t like it was in my daddy's time. It's guys with
money go to college, trained athaletes. You got to have some money to
rodeo now.”[3]A few years
pass and Ennis notices a marked difference in Jack's speech since he's
lived in Texas all that time: “A little Texas accent flavored his
sentences, ‘cow’ twisted into ‘kyow’ and ‘wife’ coming out as ‘waf'.’”[4]

A Montana horse breeder talks about the future of
ranching in his own family

Proulx’s Accordion Crimes traces the path of an accordion
across a century of ownership by families in many different communities
and regions of the United States. A Montana horse breeder talks about
the future of ranching in his own family. Peewee recounts a
conversation with his son: “My youngest boy’s home from the university
just now, talking about what he's gonna do, and he breaks it to me.
He’s not gonna stay on the ranch. Well, I says, you don’t have to, I’ll
set you up good. And if I was a young feller starting out I’d think
about Appaloosas, there’s more people starting to look at the Appaloosa
with a favorable eye.”[5] But
raising horses holds no interest for his son, who wants to be a TV
cameraman.

The novel portrays the founding of a town by German
Americans in Iowa

The novel portrays the founding of a town by German Americans in
Iowa. When one of the men suggests “Trio” as the name of the town,
another protests: “Nein, nein, no,” he says, and suggests the
name they all agree on: Pranken. The word is German for “these
paws, that will build our farms and the town. Let the name show the
work of our hands.” But the true meaning of the name gets lost when
“they filed the papers at the county seat, the word was written down as
Prank.”

Their luck would have been better if they called it Hände,
which “would of turned into Hand, a not bad name. But Prank? A joke.
Your life becomes a joke because language mixes up.”[6]

Suggested Reading/Additional Resources

Annie
Proulx, Although she didn't start her career as a writer
until she
was in her 50s, in 1993 Annie Proulx became the first woman to win the
prestigious PEN/Faulkner book award, for her debut novel, Postcards.

Christa
Smith Andersonholds an MFA in Creative
Writing from George Mason University and received her Bachelor of Arts
from the University of Virginia. After several years producing and
writing television news, she is now a federal government employee by
day and a fiction writer the rest of the time. She received the 2002
Cynthia Wynn Herman Scholarship from George Mason University and has
published non-fiction in So to Speak, a Feminist Journal of
Language and Arts.